Coping With Cancer

September 28th, 2017. It's Thursday. I'm in my first week at my new job and I am loving it. My mom has been back and forth from the hospital since August 7th, 2017. She found a lump. It's an abscess. For over a month she went everywhere with a towel in her bra as the abscess was drained. She had seven biopsies. One came back positive, breast cancer. That is all she is told on 9/28/17. My mother has told me not to call her on my lunch break but she will talk to me when I get home. I knew. It must be bad news. I don't remember the rest of my day at work. I only remember going home, up to my mother's bedroom, looking at her and breaking. She didn't even need to say the word and I knew. We didn't know the full diagnosis. Was it terminal? What treatment would my mother have? So many questions but we had to wait for answers. I cried the entire next day at work. I opted to go work, I needed a distraction. I spoke with my new boss, she couldn't have been more understanding and sympathetic. She asked if I was positive on staying in work that day. I was also told any time off I needed for my mother's treatment, etc., I could take. I take every Wednesday off as this has become my mother's chemotherapy day.

It's scary, when you get told that someone who you rely on has cancer. I took my mother's news the worst out of all my family.

A week later we were told that my mother has stage one breast cancer, less than seven percent cancer in her. We were ecstatic, this was good news. Now for the treatment. She was told that there would be 24 weeks of chemotherapy, 12 weeks of one and 12 weeks of another. After the chemo she will undergo an operation to remove her right breast as it is now dead from the abscess. Five weeks after she has had her operation she will undergo radiotherapy, we haven't been told the duration of her final treatment.

First week of October my mother started her chemo treatment. We had been told every side effect that is known to the oncologists. We were apprehensive, we were entering the unknown and we were lost.

The nurses! There are no words that can express what the nurses on the chemo ward do, how they make you feel at complete ease. Nothing is too much for them. The best part, they are not there for just the patient but for others too. I remember my mother being hooked up to a machine, a very friendly, young chemo nurse sat in front of my mother, slowly going through the treatment, the side effects, every detail. She made sure that not only my mother took in this information but I did too. Every week we go in and the nurses greet you like you are an old friend. If you need a cry, they are there for you. They try their best to answer all the questions that get thrown their way.

Unfortunately, Macmillan are not so good. We have had one meeting with a Macmillan nurse and even that was brief. They do counseling sessions for patients and their families/friends but you have to book months in advance. They offer swimming as a fitness regime for cancer patients but my mother has a PICC line in her arm, so swimming is out of the question. There are no Macmillan nurses on the chemo ward at the hospital, only the RN's who, as I stated before, do an amazing job.

We still have a long journey ahead of us but so far it is all good news. The cancer has NOT spread and everything is running smoothly for my mother. Even if she is given the all clear at the end of this year my mother will still be monitored for five years. My brother and I are also on the screening list as we have never had cancer in the family so we are unsure if mom is a carrier or not. If I could teach one thing from this is just to remind EVERYONE to check, check for lumps, bumps etc. Anything that you don't feel is right get checked, no matter how small you think it is. It's better to be safe than sorry.